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Hey guys, I've only actually played one "epic" game after the release of the Raider, and it was with a good group of guys at my local store. However, I was reading over the Epic Tournament Rules and had a few questions. I don't have the ruling for standard Epic Play (I'm assuming it comes with the Tantive, the only huge ship I don't have yet), so I was looking to this to get a grip for specific rules.

My question to you guys is, do you use the Epic Tournament Rules for the Epic Games?

The reason I ask, is because I see a few things that have been mentioned in here that I've heard that people don't use normally, but they seem to make sense.

A. Errata: Range 3-5 only grants 1 additional defense die, not 1-3. This is a really nice rule, as the +3 dice made the primary weapon rather useless to shoot at ships far away.
B. During Deployment, you assign Energy tokens to all of your Huge ships and all of their weapons. There is no ruling anywhere I could find that said you actually start with any energy, but apparently in Tournaments they make it so that you do.

Those of you that play with Epic rules, do you use these rulings? And if not, why? I was hoping to start using these, as they seem to make more sense to me.

We use both of these rules, and I think they improve gameplay.

The old range 3-5 rules made Huge ships almost totally ineffective against enemy fighters until the mid game. Those fighters got 2-3 extra defense dice against primary weapon attacks, Turbolasers are ineffective against ships with two or more defence dice, and Quad Lasers wouldn't be in range anyhow. Ion Cannon Batteries would be your only reliable weapon at range 4.

The extra defense dice also applied to Huge ships, and so you got into these silly slap fights between two CR-90's just circling each other at range 5, where they could only really hurt each other using their turbolasers. There was no particular incentive for fighters to dive in and try to tip the balance, because it would just give the CR-90 the opportunity to use their primary weapon effectively and rip up the fighters. There was great incentive to just play keep-away with your non-huge ships, and the CR-90 is far too lumbering to try to close the distance.

With the change to the defense dice, fighters can dive in to range 3 of a huge ship with no additional ill effects (you're still avoiding quad lasers and jammers). And if you're a ship with only 1 defense dice, there's actually some incentive to get into range 1-2, where you can totally avoid turbolasers. The defense dice change is purely a buff to the big ship, but it also has that strange effect of making more placement options viable for the small ships.

The Energy rule has the effect of giving Huge ships a much better alpha strike, as well giving them much more maneuvering options in the first few turns (they don't have to do a bunch of straight 1's to build up energy). Some might argue that this takes away some of the interesting energy economy gameplay at the beginning of the game. I very much disagree with that - in practice, under the old rules you would waste two or three turns just building up your energy with Huge ships doing small maneuvers, and so you would enter the fight with maxed out energy anyhow. In the meantime, your fighters have already spent 2-3 turns mixing it up with the enemy, and have likely suffered losses. When the huge ships finally enter play with their maxed-out energy, they end up having a proportionality larger effect on game-play (since there are simply more dead small ships). This isn't good for the tempo of the game - the new method of energy allocation means that your fighters and huge ships enter the fight at roughly the same time.